My monthly crush? Overlooked Bowie

I’ve been taking an evening class at Harvard this semester on Flash authoring & multimedia. While working up a recent assignment, I rediscovered the greatest modern-era David Bowie song you’ve never heard, and I had to share.

Reading interviews with Bowie around the release of 1997’s Outside album, he mentioned that some of the songs were written with the aid of computers — words and phrases got fed into a computer, and lyrics were spit out. When approaching an assignment for my class (make a random poetry generator), I thought, “what’s good enough for Bowie is good enough for me.” I ended up creating a random David Bowie song generator by feeding the songs from Outside, line by line to keep it relatively logical, into the code, and voilà! Random songs! Wanna see my handiwork? Cick here (link opens pop-up window).

To keep me in the mood while I coded the ActionScript, I listened to Outside, and was reminded of just how much I loved that album. This collaboration with Brian Eno revitalized his career after his late 80’s/early 90’s lows and reinvigorated him as a songwriter and performer. As a concept album, Outside is a bit of a failure (the story about a private detective investigating grisly “art crimes” is half-baked and the spoken-word, story-based segues are weird and unsatisfying), but it works as a collection of futuristic, paranoid pop songs. He dabbles in NIN-inflected industrial rock here and there (”The Heart’s Filthy Lesson,” “Hallo Spaceboy”), but the heart of the album is Eno’s fusion of techno and rock with Bowie’s graceful vocals.

“Strangers When We Meet” is easily the album’s highlight. Originally written for the soundtrack to the BBC miniseries The Buddha of Suburbia, Bowie reworked it with Eno for Outside. It’s a fantastic, mature pop song that ends the album on an emotional high, and there’s no reason it shouldn’t have been a big, big hit — it’s got a great beat, bassline, and melody; Bowie’s vocals are strong and resonant; and its’ chorus is one of the best lines I’ve ever heard in song: “All my violence/Raging tears upon the sheets/I’m resentful/For we’re strangers when we meet.” Give it a try & see what you’ve been missing.

Download: David Bowie, “Strangers When We Meet” (mp3)
(Right-click/control-click link to download)